


flame-touched

by tigriswolf



Series: autobiography [34]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Autobiography, Essays, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Poetry, Real Life, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 11:14:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15971177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigriswolf/pseuds/tigriswolf
Summary: Excerpt from a paper I wrote (I've thought about turning it into an article & trying to get it published) about my poetry and the apartment fire I survived.





	flame-touched

**Author's Note:**

> Excerpt from a paper I wrote (I've thought about turning it into an article & trying to get it published) about my poetry and the apartment fire I survived.
> 
> I'm working on my doctoral general exams right now; due to my lit review, I've reread quite of few of the papers I've written in grad school. This is part of one of them. *shrugs* 
> 
> Don't know why I'm posting this here, or why I put it up on my tumblr. I guess because it's cleansing.

 

 

_Life is a series of Befores and Afters.  You’ll know them at the time, or you’ll know them in hindsight.  Some are bigger than others.  For me, the big ones are Before Mom’s heart surgery, Before Katrina, Before graduating high school and college, Before my mother spoke to me as an adult she could complain about work to, Before finally putting my hands on my Master’s degree, Before the flood—_

_Before_

_the Fire._

_And_

_After._

~…~

I don’t remember most of the last three weeks of January 2017.  

I woke up at 4 in the morning on January 14, 2017, because of my roommate [name] screaming, because of the fire alarm shrieking, because of the stench of smoke.  

I didn’t go to sleep until late that afternoon.  

I woke up in my bed in my room in my apartment.  

I went to sleep in the bed that was once mine in the room that was once my younger sister’s in my parents’ house.  

I woke up still having a cat.  

I went to sleep without my cat.  

Before the fire, I went to sleep excited for an opportunity that had literally fallen into my lap on January 13, 2017.  

(January 13 was a Friday.  Not sure I ever noticed that at the time.)

After the fire, I went to sleep adamant that I was still dreaming and had yet to wake up.

~…~

Before the fire, the most traumatic events in my life (in order from least to worst) were:

1.      My grandfather’s death when I was 11.  I was at his house when he died.

2.      Making an unscheduled dismount from a cantering horse when I was 20. This incident gave me a severely-sprained ankle and a minor concussion.  My riding helmet actually split in two.  My first brush with _holy shit I could have died_.  I don’t remember much of that day, either.  

3.      The drama before finally getting my Master’s degree, when I was 28.

4.      The Flood of 2016, also when I was 28.  My apartment didn’t flood; my parents’ house didn’t flood. My older sister (evacuated by boat with husband + pets) and my aunt (evacuated by boat with son + pets) and my uncle (sheltered at his son’s) were not so lucky.  My parents, older sister and brother-in-law, aunt, three dogs, and two cats sought shelter with me after they all left my parents’ house together because water was creeping up the street.  Water came within six inches of my parents’ door. I spent two days in a low-stage panic because there was absolutely _nothing I could do for anyone_.  Once everyone could go home and assess the damage, I ran errands for all of my family living in Baton Rouge and Denham Springs because I was physically incapable of helping gut houses.

Before the fire, nothing truly awful had ever personally happened to _me_. I bore witness to others’ misfortunes and comforted as I could, helped when I could.

After the fire… despair, grief, agony—they weren’t just words I used as descriptors in my stories anymore.  They had become anchors, balanced on my shoulders, sunk into my soul.

~…~

I called 911 as I wrestled with the fire extinguisher.  The upstairs neighbor came down with his own fire extinguisher.  I remember him rushing back out and upstairs to get his child, and I remember that moment of realization: _This is bad_.  I had thought we could contain it, put it out—but my roommate dragged me away as I shouted for my cat.

We pounded on neighbors’ doors, shouting, “Fire! Fire!”

I sank onto the grass by the parking lot, watching the flames billow out of my roommate’s room, and I called my mother.  

The firetrucks came.

I called my younger sister.

I asked the firefighters if I could go look for my cat.  I asked multiple firefighters multiple times.  All of them told me, “No.”

My mother arrived with her sister, my aunt, who still lived with my parents because of the flood, who had taken over the room that used to be mine until I moved into the apartment I watched burn.

My mother led me to the ambulance that followed the firetrucks because I kept coughing. I had only my sleepshorts, my t-shirt, my glasses, and my phone.  What I was wearing as I slept and what I grabbed when I woke.  The EMTs gave me a pair of socks.  

[little sister] arrived with a pair of her husband’s crocks for me to wear.

Firefighters still fought the fire, which billowed up to the second floor.

I couldn’t stay in my sister’s car or the ambulance—they felt too small.  I had to get out.  I had to breathe.

I kept asking if I could go back in for my cat.  My mother and sister assured me that he was fine, that he’d be okay, and I had to believe them.  I had to.

I sat in the ambulance, coughing and trying to get ash off my arms when my aunt asked my mother to join her outside.

The firefighters had found my cat.

~…~

I sobbed in my mother’s arms and I kept begging, “I want to wake up.  Please.  I want to wake up.”

_I want to wake up._

_This is just a nightmare._

_I just have to wake up._

_I want to wake up._

_Please._

~…~

Because I read Renato Rosaldo’s _The Day of Shelly’s Death_ , I realized that poetry and autoethnography could be used together. In the introduction of Rosaldo’s book, Jean Franco calls the work “anthropoetry.” I call what I’m doing here _autoethnopoetry_. A cursory glance around the internet shows I am not the first to do so.

In the months after the fire, as I and my mother dealt with the insurance claim, salvaging what could be salvaged, purchasing necessities, and finding the will to actually go through every day, I wrote. Of course I wrote.  I went to class, to work.  I actually taught my first ever course, a true blessing because it gave me something to do, to focus on, outside of myself and my attempt at returning to my pre-fire routine.

I’ve compiled some of my _flame-touched_ poetry, as I call it, in the pages that follow. I’ll present the poems with my commentary on what I was feeling as I wrote them, with the intention of tracking the healing process. In this work-in-progress project, I’ll cover January through March of 2017.  

When I told my mother about this autoethnopoetry project, she asked, “Can you handle it?”  So, too, did my little sister. Renato Rosaldo wrote his poems over many years—I wrote mine in a span of months.  How soon after Shelly’s death did he first spill his emotions over a page?

There are two pieces I will not include in this project.  The first is a poem I wrote in February 2017, and rewrote and revised and rewrote again.  I haven’t looked at it since that February, since the memorial my family (Mom, Dad, aunt, little sister, and my no-longer-roommate) and I held for Gus in Orange Beach, Alabama.  There exists only one copy of that poem and it’s hidden away in a box with other memories of Gus.

The second piece remains unfinished.  I began it on a sunny morning in June, Writing into the Day as part of a poetry workshop.  I decided to do a 2-voice poem to be part of my demonstration at the end of the workshop. So as I picked away at a chocolate Vita-top, I began writing from the point of view of my cat as a 10-week-old kitten, when we first found him wandering outside in a storm and as an 8-year-old loving tomcat, who died during the fire, seeking shelter in my bedroom.

           I managed the kitten part of the poem, but began tearing up during the second part because six-months on, it was still too fresh.  Too painful.  I dropped the pen and rushed from the room.  As I leant against the wall in the hallway outside, I tried to sob as quietly as I could because I didn’t want to disturb anyone else.

But one of my classmates came after me.  Put her arms around my shoulders.  Comforted me as a I cried.

I’ll never finish that poem.

 

~…~

I write. Writing is fun, writing is easy, writing is therapeutic. Though I have analyzed the writing of others, very rarely have I done so of my own work.  To analyze the poems herein—can I handle this? will it hurt too much? perhaps, instead of tearing the wound open, it’ll lance the wound, and hurt just enough.

Perhaps, too, this shall be therapeutic.  My therapist thinks so.


End file.
